Welcome to Levoile!

Etienne Audet has failed to become God.

Preparing the punishment...

[♫♫♫]

You breathe in and smell the sea.

The smell of the sea is a curious one, because it is the same all over the world, whether you are getting on a ship and tearfully waving goodbye to your family on the last occasion you see them, or whether you are stepping off that same boat onto the shores of a strange land full of strange people where you plan on doing all sorts of strange things, or whether you are being summoned by a tall and silent boatman in order to meet with someone who has been keeping you captive on an island chain for months.

There are no mysteries at Cipher Cove — they have been eroded away like the soft and porous chalky rocks of a cliffside are eroded by the steady and unstoppable juggernaut of the tide. Much like the sea, the truth can be peaceful or terrible, shallow or deep enough to lose oneself in a thousand times over, a violent destroyer of worlds or a serene and peaceful landscape. Like a looter breaking into an ancient tomb and using a crowbar to remove the gold and jewels from a sarcophagus, every scrap of mystery has been removed from your circumstances, leaving nothing but the simple fact that one day you will die and there will be no pomp or ceremony to it, not really.

When every question, every doubt, every unknown has been stripped to the bone like carrion in the desert, all that remains is action. You have been invited to meet your captor — you are even being offered a free ferry ride, free of charge, from your most gracious of hosts. Owls and ravens fly overhead, a conspiracy and a parliament linked hand in hand by the airships that loom on the horizon, hanging in the sky like a heart that’s stopped seconds before a dizzying fall.

The problem with questions, generally speaking, is that to ask a question is to posit that your problems will be resolved once you learn the answer, and this is of course not the case: an answer may be unsatisfactory, it may be the very opposite of what you want to hear, it may be something so outside your sphere of comprehension that you never expected you might hear it at all. The terrible truth behind the mysteries of Cipher Cove is that answers are not always better than questions.

[♫♫♫]

The Lonely Lighthouse stands tall and solitary on the beach, a witness to so much evil that it’s been long since horrified into silence. Places are like people; they often find themselves with everything that’s happened to them etched into their bones, cross-stitched into the fiber of their being, daubed in smeared red hues on their insides. Cipher Cove is more than a series of desolate, barren islands — it is a place that has taken far too many secrets unto itself and collapsed under their weight, like a waterlogged dam finally giving way.

There’s something different about the cave, this time, that high-ceiling chamber that overlooks the sea. The light that filters through casts strange shadows on the walls, distorting each of the initiates into cartoonish exaggerations of themselves, ciphers that are impossible to understand, deceptions upon deceptions until the original thing to be concealed has been obfuscated out of existence entirely.

The plinths of Augustus and Fayez bear the former’s shattered glasses and an unfinished sock, knitting needles crossed over it. A bloodied book rests where Henry Wingfield once stood. There is a shadow looming over the room, not just the shadows cast by the light of the sea but the sort of shadow that causes eclipses — the shadow of something impossible huge and fearsome that blots out all light and casts the world into confusion and chaos.

A cipher is a simple code, a mechanism by which one character is substituted for another. Perhaps, the world is only one big cipher wheel, and the slightest turn of it can suddenly make everything you thought you understood look like something else entirely, an alien combination of glyphs and sigils, replacing the known and familiar with the strange and alarming.

Case Victim: Fayez Rezgui

Location of Body: Lonely Lighthouse (3rd Floor)

Time of Discovery: 6:59 PM 

[♫♫♫]

“Two this time, is it,” Charon says idly. “Your time isn’t going to be extended despite this. Three hours. Now, go.” 

He seems to hurry out of the hotel very quickly. Two case files have been pinned in the relevant places, as usual. How could this happen, when Henry had insisted on him and Nemesis being the last? 

A sense of foreboding is over you all...

[♫♫♫] 

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is a turn of phrase which describes the sickly anxious feeling one gets in the pit of one’s stomach when one knows something terrible is approaching, but not when. It is the feeling of being in freefall, and knowing that the ground is rushing up to initiate a meeting you very much want to avoid, like a distant aunt at a party that you’ve long forgotten the name of and will spend the rest of any conversation with awkwardly trying to circumnavigate that fact. It is the lurch that one feels when one misplaces one’s footing, in the futile moments of windmilling one’s arms before gravity gets sick and tired of one’s antics and drags one to the ground. And ever since the execution of Henry Wingfield, you have all been waiting for the other shoe to drop. There are no more islands to explore in the waters of Cipher Cove — the initiates have plundered this place of its mysteries like British explorers stealing another culture’s priceless cultural artefacts. They have found the answers they were seeking and realized that sometimes finding an answer, like being given a box of rabid wolverines, creates exponentially more problems than it solves.

Any period of peace in the Cove has inevitably been interrupted by something: a storm of lightning, flashes of green and purple and blue that split the sky and open up the bowels of the Earth to spill out all the secrets locked within, like a bomb breaking open a vault full of rare treasures, or a game, games that everybody who played is now acutely aware were nothing more than charades, play-acting, to the real work of Levoile’s secret societies as children playing house is to drawn-out and bitter divorce proceedings in which two people who once loved each fight tooth and nail to destroy one another.  Unfortunately, the tension that has been building over the last week isn’t going to be interrupted by either of those things — the other shoe is being pulled back, ready to deliver a steel-capped kick to the ribs.

Cecilija, Teddy, and Therese arrive on the mainland aboard the ferry just before seven in the evening. They are in limbo, in motion, a car full of undone seatbelts about to be politely but firmly introduced to a brick wall by a universe with a sense of humour and a penchant for punishing hubris. There is no sense of security in Cipher Cove — the ancient war machines and hibernating monsters make a mockery of the very idea, and the sight that awaits Cecilija’s eyes only a few minutes after the boat alights on the shore, one which she wastes no time in alerting the other two to, is to a sense of security like a match to a gasoline-soaked rag. Sometimes the impact of something terrible is all the worse for the shock of it, sometimes all the worse for the anticipation, but very often the two mingle into a combination that, like a cocktail made up of different kinds of spirits, is far more like a kick to the head than its individual parts.

There is no advantage to the knowledge that something terrible is going to happen if the terrible thing is going to happen anyway.

[♫♫♫]

The purpose of a lighthouse is to shine a light into darkness. To act as a beacon that leads ships to safety, like a friend taking your hand to guide you through a strange place. But as the ferry sails a direct course towards the lonely lighthouse on the mainland, it seems that this lighthouse would only take someone’s hand in order to play the cruel trick where one pretends to offer a hand up to someone who has fallen down only to let them hit the ground for a second time, this one likely to sting doubly so for the betrayal.

The last few days, of course, have brought nothing but betrayal — or perhaps that’s not true. After all, the initiates have more answers than they did before the mysteries of the Bellicose Bayou were answered, and the questions they do have are of an entirely more practical bent. There is a certain degree of sophistication that ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions have that ‘what’ ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions lack —  a savoir faire, perhaps, in knowing that after one has answered the basics of questions such as “what was that noise I just heard,” “where did it come from,” and “who is the armed man I just saw entering my house through the back door,” one is able to build up an internal model of one’s situation upon which more complex questions can be built, such as “how quietly can I climb out of my bedroom window” and “why has someone been sent to my house on a Tuesday night to kill me.”

Now that the initiates are able to ask themselves: “why has the rogue agent of Vivere Disce brought us here and forced us to do this?” and “how can we escape?” and “why are all the chairs in this city so goddamn uncomfortable, seriously, what’s up with that”, perhaps the embers of hope in their heart can be fanned back up into flames. The feeling of anxiety that lingers in their hearts like an unwanted and self-invited houseguest teeters on the brink of exhilaration, a dark determination that stands on the edge of a precipice and resists the urge to jump only to pull out a pair of skis and grin like a maniac. As the ferry alights among others of its ilk, the lighthouse shines its beacon far out to sea.

The question to ask is, when they find the answers they seek, will the initiates sink or swim? Oh! Oh, my dearest apologies, I didn’t mean to stir up bad memories. I keep doing this. Give me a moment to collect myself Let’s start again; the question to ask is… no, wait, that one wouldn’t be any good either. Alright. Let’s just consign this paragraph, and between you and me we’ll pretend it  never happened, okay? This is the last chapter, and my last chance to not dig myself any deeper.

And now I’m anxious. Count down with me, okay? Three, two, one…

Will the answers be a restorative draught or a deadly poison? 

There we go. Fucking nailed it.

Henry Wingfield has failed the initiation test.

Preparing the punishment…

[♫♫♫]

Since the day of the storm, the Monumental Mechanism has lain silent and still -- but is it dead, or is it perhaps just biding its time? Like a bear in hibernation, it seems best not to irritate it, although someone seems to have been doing their damned best to achieve just that. There’s a certain degree of irony involved in investigating the death of a detective, like the arson of a fire department or the betrayal of a friend -- uncovering the truth is made more difficult by the very nature of the truth to be uncovered.

But it seems like none of the truths that hide among the islands of Cipher Cove are pleasant ones. Most useful truths, however, are unpleasant, and much like the captain of a warship being told there’s a breach in the hull, the truth is vital and painful in equal measures. There is no breach in the hull of the S.S. Elijah, however, as Charon sails you once more to a cave, illuminated in eerie colours, the seawater throwing out twisting and coiling shadows onto the edges of the cave.

[♫♫♫]

“Don’t worry about the body. You have three hours.

...Hmph. If you really can’t be bothered to look around in the water, then call me over.”

The waters that surround you all have finally claimed someone, and grief abounds. Even so, for the poor victim’s sake, you must press on and solve the mystery that lies below.

The sunken warships at the mouth of the Darkling Delta sit low in the water, their presence menacing in an entirely different way to the menace that would be posed by war machines in gleaming condition: it is a menace that tells you that one day, you too might be ancient and rusting, useless, discarded, and slowly wasting away somewhere far away from anybody who cares about you. It is a menace that tells you that one day every dream will die, every dearly cultivated ambition will turn on you as a sour, venomous little thing. The menace of those still and silent war machines is the menace of the world moving around you while all the running you can do only serves to keep you in the same place.

The Monumental Mechanism, since the storm, has gone back to its previous silent state, lying dormant like a boa constrictor slowly digesting a meal -- which is why the flash of light and the explosion of light and colour that erupts from one of the gears in the early afternoon comes as a shock to the small party that happens to be investigating the sleeping behemoth at the time. After a few seconds of rapidly reorienting themselves, they realize that the arc of crackling light didn’t originate from the mechanism, but from the Darkling Delta. Etienne, Mitzi, and Eliana hurry to see what’s happening.

The arc of energy that spiraled haphazardly through the air like an aircraft being shot down originated from one of the warships that slowly decays in the Delta’s ship graveyard, that’s for sure, but which one? That’s the question which is out of the curious investigators’ minds just as quickly as it enters them, as they spot something just underneath the water by a breach in the hull of the C.C.C.S. Hubris. It’s difficult to make out until Etienne floats them over, and the grisly clarity of confronting something up close reminds them of the lesson that the ship graveyard has to teach:

[♫♫♫]

Therese and Chiyoko have emerged from the storm at last, and as it abides, you can’t help but recall the expression ‘the eye of the storm’. A moment of peace before the chaos resumes --  but you’ve yet to be offered any moment of peace, temporary or otherwise, and you can’t quite decide whether the worst is behind you or yet to come. When they arrive at the hotel, Chiyoko is carrying a record, old and battered, which she slots into the record-player.

The voice that you hear as the recording begins is certainly the voice of Ashraqat Hazred. But there’s something missing from it. It’s difficult to say what -- some spark, the filament of a light bulb, a pilot light. She sounds distant, faraway to the point of being nearly completely absent. And yet, it’s her voice.

“She’s dead,” is what she says, before the sound cuts off. A few seconds of silence go by, and just when your first instinct might be that there’s no more to hear on this record, she continues, her voice now audibly shaky. “Morgana. She’s dead. The Cipher Cove Conspiracy, it’s over. I… fuck. It’s all over. Or. It isn’t, really. Because it wasn’t… it wasn’t her, that’s not… it’s not just what she was like, it was that stupid fucking piece of shit glori-fuckin-fied rock, she wasn’t… I didn’t even mean to, I was just tryin’ to get it out of her fuckin’ hands and we were strugglin’ for it and…”

There’s another brief period of silence as the recording is paused. The tail end of a sob is barely audible once it’s turned back on. “So now I’m recordin’ this because… because, fuck, if it happens again, if someone gets their hands on it again, someone’s gotta to know what happened, right? Maybe they can… do somethin’ about it. Fuck. ‘Cause I’m not… I’m not stickin’ around here much longer, not without her, not after…”

Silence. “So anyway. Here’s what I’m doin’. I’m hidin’ the Heart, that glorified fuckin’ piece of candy, and I’m hidin’ Levoile. Nobody’s gonna get in or outta here -- she called it… the dis-lo-cation drive, I think -- and I’m destroyin’ her notes, burning it all, so nobody can figure out how to use the fuckin’ thing even if they do get their hands on it. And I’ve left behind a little shard of it, not enough to do much, just enough that… if someone gets their hand on the full thing, someone in my family will know, and hopefully they’ll be able to get there in time and stop anythin’ happenin’. That’s goin’ to the Pierce cousins.”

“And I’m lockin’ off the Cove, and I’ve got enough of the fuckin’... conspiracy on my side, that the rest of Morgan’s plans ain’t gonna go ahead, ‘cause they’re all too busy fighting each other now to do anythin’ like that. And… fuck, I had to do it, right? I had to stop her, because if I waited she’d just get stronger, she’d have more superweapons and double agents and… I wanted to trust her so fuckin’ bad, right?” This time, she doesn’t turn off the recording device, and sobs openly. “But you can’t trust anyone when they’ve got that power. It makes you too dangerous, and… fuck, I had to stop it, do you understand that? I had to.”

She sighs. “So. Levoile’s locked off from the world. Morgan’s notes are destroyed, and the Heart is hidden, and… I don’t understand it enough to destroy it, or the weapons, or anything, I couldn’t even read her fuckin’ notes ‘cause I’ve always been the fuckin’ stupid one, ain’t I. And if you’re hearin’ this then… then I guess whoever ended up with my piece of the Heart didn’t succeed in stopping whatever’s happenin’, and you’re at Cipher Cove, and someone’s got control of the Heart, so listen to me when I tell you: you’ve got to stop them. Whatever it takes. You got to.”

There’s a long silence. “...There’s not even anything left of her. Just a… a fuckin’ scorch mark, where she was standing.” A pause. “I’m sorry, Morgan. I’m sorry, Cy… fuck, man, I killed a man, years ago, and all this time later I still never bothered to learn his fuckin’ name. Sorry. I… I fucked up. I fucked up really badly. Hopefully this fixes it. Hopefully there’s somethin’ good for me after all this. Not sure if I deserve it, but…” and the winds start to howl in the background of the recording, as if the device has been moved to the edge of a great, great precipice. “At least I tried, right? They can put that on the fuckin’ gravestone, heh. Here lies Ashraqat Hazred. ‘Least she tried.” She whispers something, barely audible, but it’s easy to tell what it is - it’s a prayer. Then the wind screams, and then, very quietly, there is a crash.

[♫♫♫]

The first thing you think as the gale-force winds nearly throw you off your feet and the multicoloured lightning arcs towards the ground as if the sky is reaching out for a long-lost lover is something is different, this time. The storm is no longer akin to the furious roar and bloodthirsty ravages of a wounded animal, but instead strikes with the surgically precise movements of an apex predator. A pillar of glass rises up, ten stories high, and is summarily disintegrated by a stream of green energy, reshaped and then shattered countless times until the shards of glass seem to dance through the air in hypnotic and fractal patterns, never staying the same for more than a moment.

The Fictitious Forest lights up, the circuit-like patterns on the trees glowing violet and electric blue, veins of turquoise and vivid orange spreading out across the ground, providing light in the darkness as thick black clouds block out the sun. The Monumental Mechanism purrs like a satisfied cat who has just done something he knows he shouldn't have and is now smugly waiting for you to notice, the ground starting to vibrate just a little as the lightning converges, pouring into the gears of the mechanism where the energy seems to pool, converging much like condensation. Grooves and notches in the machinery wide enough across to be rivers pulse with the otherworldly energy.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the human perception of the world is represented by a tribe of people, living in a dark cave, only able to see the shadows projected onto the cave’s walls and not the things and events that cause them. In the darkness, you feel even more impaired than those cave-dwellers, unable to see even a shadow of an answer to the mysteries that swirl like a storm around the island. But there are some secrets that can be uncovered, and no matter how much darkness there is, even the smallest light can always provide some degree of illumination.

The practiced motions of a blind struggle in the darkness are absent, this time. Instead, initiates of secret societies stand resolutely in the darkness, unmasked and unafraid. After a few seconds, the lights turn on. A stand has been taken -- a stand against secrecy, a stand against the charade they have been forced into, a stand that shines a bright, fearless light both into the metaphorical crevices of Plato’s cave and into the corners of the hotel. Etienne, Fayez, and Matsukaze of the East Quarter Vinery, Henry, Chiyoko, and Nemesis of the Fencing Society. Therese, Teddy, and Cecilija of the Magician’s Circle, and Rhea, Eliana, Augustus, and Mitzi of the Municipal Mint all look at each other when the lights come on.

There is something about sharing a secret which brings you closer to someone, no matter how you may feel about them otherwise. A group that shares a secret is bound together, for better or for worse. An unmarked duffel bag full of cash, a terrible crime, a grand conspiracy. These are the things that tie people together, more than common goals or even friendship can. And it is this that keeps the initiates standing as Charon approaches.

"The game is finished. Not that most of you were intent on participating this time, anyway.” His sharp gaze fixes on Teddy, who still clutches fake blueberries in her hand. “Most being the keyword.” 

He continues to speak after that, surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) unaffected by their collective mutiny. “I’ll admit it. It was impressive, your solidarity. You all could join together in the way the four societies could not. But none of them will be obtaining details on your performance anytime soon. They haven’t even any idea how to help you yet. You see, the blackouts are like everything else the societies do. Without the cover of secrecy, those four factions are just ridiculous children that don’t have a clue what they’re doing.” 

“But the time for that convoluted garbage is ending. The rogue agent has taken control of this test; you are all on the eve of a new world order. You all know exactly what the Heart of Levoile can do by now; you’ve seen so many glimpses of its power. And in order to be a part of it all... you’ll have to take another’s life.”

Unfortunately for the hostages, the facade dropping doesn’t seem to mean the end of the murder phase. “The rogue lies among you even now, wielding the power that keeps you all trapped here. So consider the offer they’re extending to you wisely. There’s a great deal on the line, this time.”

The sun gives way to utter darkness... within and without. It’s been a while since the last competition, and the tension that has already come with the zeppelin explosion is bound to build up further until it, too, bursts. There is no time for you all to relax tonight, as the phone’s incessant ringing slices through your sleep schedule and announces the cryptic characters you may as well have memorized.